Supreme Bloodline Evolution System

Max let out a furious snort, though his anger was directed less at the guard than at himself. He was beginning to curse his decision to waste so much time crossing Britana in secrecy when he could have simply flown straight through the kingdom, blasting aside anyone foolish enough to stand in his way without caring who learned of his destination.

"Is Frankindia at war with the Crimson Horde?" Max demanded, guiding his horse another step closer to the wall.

His dark eyes locked onto the officer above, carrying enough pressure to make the man’s fingers tighten around the hilt of his sword. A chill moved down the guard’s spine as he stared back, feeling as though a demon had reached through the hood and was looking directly into his soul.

"Yes," the officer answered, his voice losing some of its earlier authority. His eyes briefly moved toward the soldiers surrounding him, several of whom were now exchanging confused and cautious looks. Revealing military information to an unidentified traveler was far outside ordinary procedure, yet the officer found himself unable to refuse the question. "The Crimson Horde and the Imperial Court Empire."

Max’s eyes narrowed with fury beneath the shadow of his hood.

"Which direction is your capital?" he demanded.

His fingers clenched tightly around the reins until the leather creaked beneath his grip, causing the horse to shift uneasily under him. Beneath the dark fabric concealing his face, his human features began to fluctuate as the anger inside him forced traces of his draconic form toward the surface. His pupils sharpened, dark scales spread along the sides of his face, and the shape of his jaw slowly changed as his body struggled to contain the furious transformation.

The officer was visibly trembling now. His hand had fallen away from his sword, and all the authority he had shown moments earlier disappeared as Max’s pressure continued to close around him.

"Hey, are you all right?" another guard asked as he approached.

He placed a hand on the officer’s shoulder, only to feel the man trembling beneath his armor like a rabbit hiding from a fox. The sudden touch caused the officer to flinch so violently that he nearly stumbled against the edge of the battlement.

"There!" he squealed, throwing one arm toward the distant horizon. "To the southwest!"

Almost immediately, the atmosphere surrounding the border changed.

A wave of pressure spread outward from Max, striking both the Britanian men escorting him and the Frankindian soldiers defending the wall. Horses reared and soldiers stumbled backward as every face rapidly lost color, their instincts warning them that whatever sat beneath the dark traveling cloak was no ordinary merchant.

Before any of them could recover, Max released the reins and launched himself from the saddle. The force of his departure sent dust exploding across the road and forced the black horse several steps backward.

His cloaked figure shot into the sky like an arrow released from a fully drawn bow, tearing through the air toward the southwest before the guards could even understand what had happened. Within seconds, he became little more than a dark shape against the distant sky, racing toward the Frankindian capital with every trace of caution abandoned behind him.

He pushed himself beyond what he had believed to be his limit, forcing more mana through his body as the world blurred beneath him. The wind caught his hood and tore it away completely, exposing the dark scales spreading farther across his face, yet he barely noticed the pain of the air cutting into his skin.

The only thing still giving him some hope and reassurance was the system’s silence.

There had been no warning about Clotilde facing immediate danger, nothing resembling the frantic messages that had filled his vision when Agnia and their unborn child were threatened. At that time, the system had gone completely mad, repeatedly warning him that he would lose the bloodline gained through his mate if anything happened to the child growing inside her belly.

Every message had made the possibility of losing Agnia feel more real, turning the journey toward her into one of the most terrifying moments of his life.

This time, however, the system remained eerily silent.

Max did not know whether that meant Clotilde was safe or whether the system simply did not consider the danger serious enough to warn him. He wanted to believe it was the former, but every second that passed without an answer only allowed darker possibilities to enter his thoughts.

"Can you tell me where exactly Clotilde is?" Max roared into the wind cutting across his face.

His voice disappeared into the open sky, swallowed by the violent rush of air surrounding him. He waited for a familiar screen to appear before his eyes or for the system’s mechanical voice to answer inside his mind.

Nothing happened.

"System! Damn it!"

His eyes grew dangerously dark as more mana erupted from his body, forcing him forward even faster. Whenever he truly needed something from the system, it always behaved this way, refusing to answer and leaving him to solve everything on his own.

He could not understand why.

The system had been given to him. It existed to help him grow, collect bloodlines, and rise beyond every creature standing in his path. It was supposed to serve him, yet time after time, it withheld information as though it possessed goals and intentions of its own.

Max clenched his jaw and lowered his body against the wind.

If the system refused to help him find Clotilde, then he would tear through all of Frankindia until he found her himself.

After several hours of pushing himself without rest, Max crossed a vast stretch of Frankindian territory and passed more than a hundred settlements along the way. Some had been abandoned so recently that doors remained open and carts stood overturned in the roads, while others were still burning, thick columns of smoke rising from collapsed houses and blackened fields.

The farther he traveled, the worse the destruction became.

Entire roads were filled with discarded belongings, broken weapons, and the bodies of soldiers who had tried to slow the invasion. Deep tracks carved into the earth revealed the passage of enormous armies, all of them leading in the same direction Max was already flying.

Then, beyond the smoke covering the horizon, he finally saw the capital.

An enormous black wall surrounded a city built upon the summit of a towering mountain, its defensive towers rising so high that they appeared to pierce the clouds. Layer after layer of fortifications had been carved directly into the mountainside, creating what should have been one of the most difficult strongholds on the continent to conquer.

Yet its supposedly impenetrable defenses were already burning.